Pick a date, time, and location that seems sensible. Post a meetup. Say "I'm flexible about details, if this point in spacetime doesn't work for people". At the specified time, show up with something identifiable, and a book or some work that you can do to keep you occupied for, say, two hours in case nobody shows up. Hope somebody shows up.

Or feel free to say "I will only be there if I get at least N replies", where my own preferences would place N at one or two but YMMV. That reduces the probability of being bored and alone, but also reduces the probability of successfully meeting someone.

If you wanted low-level technical details, this is how I do it:

I have a phone number to a cafe, where I already did some meetups, so I call them to reserve a table for me on Monday from 18:00. They have no problem with it, even if I say "I am not sure how many people will come, at most 10 but maybe much less", because on Mondays they are half-empty anyway.

When I did this the first time, I used google and recommendations from my friends about nice places in the city. Then I visited personally (to see the place, and to be able to negotiate in person) and asked whether it would be okay to have a table reserved there. -- I specifically emphasised that most participants will be students who don't have much money and just want to talk, so they shouldn't expect a big revenue from this; and I asked whether that would be acceptable. (It's better to have a feedback in advance than a misunderstanding later.) -- Then I picked a Monday cca 2 weeks in future.

I post an announcement on LW, and also to the local LW mailing list. Sometimes I send personal e-mails to people I think could be interested. (Mostly they don't come, but sending the e-mail is so cheap and sometimes they come, that it's worth doing. Some people don't come the first few times, and then when I already lost hope, they appear.) -- At the beginning I also used to post an invitation on my Facebook page.

A day or two before the meetup, I send e-mail reminders. The e-mails contain my phone number, in case someone would have last-minute problem finding us.

I go to the meetup. -- At the beginning, I was careful to be the first one there, and to somehow attract other people's attention (e.g. have a paper saying "LessWrong" on the table). These days we already know each other, and we meet in a cafe that has only three tables, so this is not necessary.

There are two problems here: (1) Increasing the visibility of LW among minds which could be positively influenced by it. (2) Coordinating the already interested minds to meet at one point in the timespace.

You asked specifically about the latter, but I want to make it explicit that the former is a meta-strategy for the latter. The more people know about LW, the easier it is to get some of them to the meetup. (These is a chance -- although I wouldn't rely on it -- that with popularity big enough, someone else would organize the meetup.)

As a data point, the first meetups in Slovakia had between 4 and 6 people. And even that was because there were already 2 organizers (me and my girlfriend, and she did it partially to make me happy), and at that time there were no regular meetups in neighbor countries, so we regularly had one or two visitors from other country. It took more than a year to create a relatively stable community of about 10 local people. And I had to make some trade-offs; for example a few of them are not fluent in English, so we speak in Slovak, which excludes the potential foreign visitors.

I am saying this to prepare you not to be disappointed by smaller participation. On the other hand, there are a few possible strategic moves I have ignored so far (such as doing a LW presentation at a local university), so a better strategy could possibly bring higher participation.

There's also zoning laws. For instance, I live in DC, where there's a height cap on buildings, which makes it impossible to build towering, cheap, apartment buildings. (much to my sorrow).

That zoning law exists to keep buildings from blocking views of the Capitol, but a lot of other zoning laws exist exactly to prevent cheap apartments, because the people active in the zoning process don't want to live near the kind of people who would live in cheap apartments.

Robert Moses, from my home state of NY, is particularly famous for this kind of things. In addition to zoning, he also made sure that buses weren't allowed on some Long Island roads, or that bridge overpasses would be too low to fit buses under, to prevent people who rely on public transportation from traveling to certain neighborhoods and beaches.

The cost of complying with health and safety regulations makes it too expensive to price rent below a certain amount even at the worst the rental situation is legally allowed to be.

There's also zoning and other issues, and subtler ones like licensing of construction trades, etc. But this seems to be a big part of the story. From last year http://www.psmag.com/navigation/politics-and-law/how-the-trailer-park-could-save-us-all-55137/

By any name, they are the largest source of unsubsidized affordable housing in the country. There are seven million manufactured homes housing 18 million people. In some counties they make up 60 percent of dwellings. Approximately one out of every 12 Floridians lives in a manufactured home. Units built since 1976, when the Department of Housing and Urban Development started regulating their construction, can last as long as site-built homes when they’re well built and maintained. Yet they cost far less: $41 per square foot versus $85 per square foot and up. At least one study, from the University of Illinois-Chicago, on trailer parks in Omaha, Nebraska, found that crime rates in mobile-home parks are the same as the rest of the community; the parks do not cause crime nearby; and that the parks appear to depress crime levels because residents own their homes. In one survey, nine out of 10 owners of manufactured homes said they were satisfied with their dwellings. They’ve found a housing option that suited their budget and needs.

Commentary: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2013/04/why_trailers_in.html

Not paying rent is the least of the problems with bad tenants. There is a long tail of risk, such as destroying the building.

The middle class would prefer that people be homeless than that they have permanent dwellings that do not reach their standards. None of your explanations is correct but the second comes closest. See Flophouse. I believe Matthew Yglesias has written on this and there's a commenter on slatestarcodex, St. Rev, who may or may not have a blog, who's homeless.

• The opportunity cost of the land may be higher than you think. How far from a major population area are you looking?
• Transaction costs (an expansion of your third point) are higher than you think.

Do an estimate of what it would take for you to set up a group home in the areas you are willing to live. If you're lucky, you will be able to find partners and get it going for a bit under going rental rates. If not, you'll learn a lot and be able to report back here.

What do you mean by "bad" housing?

One possible reason is that many of the relevant aspects of good or bad housing are governed by building codes (plumbing, HVAC, bathrooms, room size, etc.) which put a (often high) lower bound on how cheap a building can be built. In addition, the organization of the construction industry (many specialized subcontractors) means there's a fairly high fixed cost for any new construction. While this mostly applies to new construction, it can apply to existing buildings as well.

What do you plan on doing with an answer to this question?

This seems easily testable. Though I cannot recommend any, I'm sure there are online memory tests that let you know how you performed relative to all the other subjects. Maybe not good enough, as there is a selection bias in the sample of people who take those tests, but it will give you some info.

However, I think that you have an above average memory and are only noticing this because you usually hang around people who have above average memory as well[1]. Perhaps a more useful test would be getting your friends to take the test as well and compare the results. Maybe ask on LW for subjects? I'd participate.

[1] Assumptions:

• You have an above average IQ. I a priori assume this of all LWers.

• There is a positive correlation between IQ and memory. A quick search gives results in favor of the assumption, but I didn't dig deeper.

• You hang around people of similar IQ.

I've wondered about this too. I once tried to organize a round-robin tournament, and discovered that all the other players preferred single elimination despite its vulnerability to noise and lack of a meaningful second place. In the ensuing argument, I discovered that they do know about problems like this, but they don't care, for two reasons:

1. They don't care much about accuracy. Tournaments ostensibly rank teams by quality, but they're used mostly as ritual contests: the audience wants to know who won, not who would most likely win.
2. They don't like complexity or novelty. They're suspicious of any design they don't understand, because they're afraid it might be gamed, or might have perverse incentives (e.g. where losing a match helps you win the tournament), and because they want everyone, even the dumb jocks, to understand the rules.

If we end biological aging we still have accidents. If we end accidents we still have suicide. If we end suicide we still have the heat death of the universe.

Making peace with death isn't a terrible use of time regardless of circumstance.

Along these lines, if we pretend there is actually a zero percent chance of curing death in our lifetime, how should we rationally act differently? Often people use the cliche 'if you were going to die tomorrow what would you do differently today?' as a thought experiment, seemingly implying (to me at least) that we're already living rationally for an ~80 year lifetime and that only changes in behavior should come from learning you have a very short time to live left.

I often wonder if I too easily approximate ~80 years as infinity in my reasoning about life, and that I'm not appropriately taking into account an 80 year life span (or much shorter if you subtract sleep, how old you are now, and years of life you think you'll be healthy enough to have control over).

TLDR: I think it's hard to reason about spans of time that are longer than we've experienced but shorter than infinity, and I don't know what to do about it.

The anti-death argument you are implicitly referencing only states that "Death is bad", not "we have to feel negative emotions in response to death".

There's nothing wrong with coming to terms with it, as in "this bad thing will probably happen to me, and I accept that it must be so". It's like if you lose a limb - its possible to come to terms with that even if it's clearly bad.

Who would be willing to fund this research? The cryonics organizations usually run at losses (membership and preservation fees do not pay 100% of expenses) and don't have the money for much research. And the public doesn't care - have you donated to the nearest available equivalents like the Brain Preservation Prize? If you haven't and are unwilling, then you have your answer.

Why isn't there more research in progress on how to wake up people from cryonics? Or, rather, why aren't more people sticking hamsters and dogs under liquid nitrogen*, then trying to revive them and bring them back to "full life", and seeing if dear ole Spot remembers all the tricks we taught him?

Because anything bigger than a cubic centimeter or two that you try to vitrify always comes out of vitrification full of massive cuts and chemical toxicity and ice crystals and leaky membranes to the point that calling it temporarily 'alive' is a stretch. This is not a problem with the revival process, but with the preservation process. Even freezing samples of cultured cells has a mortality rate.